America’s Employment Losses Might Be Slowing: Job Tracker

Joblessness seems to be slowing from its April peak, according to new data from an analysis of daily surveys conducted by Civis Analytics. But women, low-income workers and part-time workers continue to experience the worst of the American labor market during the pandemic.

March and April were devastating, but May seems to be flattening

Percent of workers newly nonemployed since March 1, 14-day rolling average

Note: Excludes workers age 65 and older

The surveys from Civis Analytics, a data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic campaigns, include demographic information and employment status, offering a sense of the pace of the daily economic downturn.

Other researchers tracking employment have also noted a slowdown in employment losses. Although our tracker is not intended to replace or precisely replicate official government surveys, it’s roughly consistent with the monthly jobs report data. For example, the Current Population Survey implies employment among working-age Americans fell 13.8 percent between early March and early April, while our tracker shows employment among this population fell 13.2 percent by mid-to-late April.

Because these results are cumulative, a slowdown means that fewer people are joining the ranks of the unemployed but also that few of the workers who became unemployed in March and April are returning to work.

The results are useful because our more traditional barometers of the labor market are lagging in relation to the rapid pace of the country’s economic decline. And although weekly unemployment claims are a useful snapshot, states do not report them with the sort of consistent demographic detail that allows researchers to dig beneath the headline numbers. Claims may also be distorted by state offices’ ability to handle the surge in claim volume; confusion among workers over who is eligible; and the likelihood that many confused workers apply multiple times.

The government’s household survey for April asked Americans about their work activities during the week of April 12. Our tracker suggests that the May report will show further deterioration in employment versus April. But it also suggests that almost all of this extra damage occurred before late April.

The flattening of joblessness is uneven across demographic groups. Low-income workers have been hit harder than middle- or high-income ones. Middle-income workers are now having the most robust decline in employment losses.

Job loss among higher-income and middle-income workers is converging

Percent of workers newly nonemployed since March 1, 14-day rolling average

Like the employment report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our analysis shows that women have been hit more severely than men.

Job loss among male and female workers may have peaked

Percent of workers newly nonemployed since March 1, 14-day rolling average

The biggest disparity may be between part- and full-time workers. Almost a quarter of part-time workers have lost their jobs since March 1, but less than a tenth of full-time workers have.

Job loss among part-time workers is persistently high

Percent of workers newly nonemployed since March 1, 14-day rolling average

The small differences in results by race and ethnicity have grown modestly since last week, with black and Hispanic workers seeing a rise in joblessness while white workers have experienced a decline.

Job loss rate is relatively similar by race

Percent of workers newly nonemployed since March 1, 14-day rolling average

Since our tracker is based on survey data, it’s subject to noise and error. Readers should not overinterpret chart changes. But the data should capture the broad contours of where the job market is headed while we wait for official word from government sources.

Methodology

The Upshot Job Tracker uses data provided by Civis Analytics, which runs surveys almost every day using a number of online panels. Civis periodically re-interviews people and can compare the changes in responses over time in key variables, in this case employment. The survey asks people about their current employment status (working full time, working part time, or not working) as well as a series of demographic questions. The questions are not designed to reproduce those asked on official government surveys like the Current Population Survey, so there may be some discrepancy in how survey takers interpret full-time employment, part-time employment and annual household income.

We take each person’s daily response, using only the last daily response in cases of multiple entries per day, and create a series of rolling 14-day panels. Each respondent is limited to appearing once (the latest response) in each rolling panel. The resulting sample size for the rolling panels ranges from approximately 6,600 to 20,000.

We weight each rolling 14-day panel to reflect key characteristics of the U.S. working-age population (18 to 64) in the February 2020 basic monthly C.P.S., including age, sex, education and race/ethnicity proportions. We further interact each of these dimensions with pre-pandemic employment status.

Ernie Tedeschi is an economist and head of fiscal analysis at Evercore ISI. He worked previously at the U.S. Treasury Department. You can follow him on Twitter at @ernietedeschi.